


Wool Over Three Eyes

by TheChainLink



Category: Original Work
Genre: Body Horror, Dreams vs. Reality, Hallucinations, Is this just fantasy?, is this the real life?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:15:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27301051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheChainLink/pseuds/TheChainLink
Summary: When Debra awakes with a headache, she assumes it's just an ordinary migraine.Of course, her idea of "normal" is something else entirely...
Kudos: 1





	Wool Over Three Eyes

The pain was back. 

Debra jolted awake. Yes, the pain was there once again. Right now it was barely more than a distant throb in her head, but it was there, and growing stronger seemingly by the second. 

She took a quick glance around the plane. It was early in the morning; most of the other passengers were asleep, and those who weren’t were either staring at their phones or watching movies, ignoring her entirely. 

Debra forced herself to stay calm, not wanting to cause a scene. If she did, they’d just say she was being hysterical again. That was always it. Just another panic attack, they’d say, nothing to worry about. 

Always her, they’d say. 

Never them.

Anyway, she reminded herself, the medication was in her handbag, right there by her feet. So with a sigh of relief, she reached down to get it. Nothing to worry about. Just a little scare, that’s all.

Just a little…

…scare…

The medication wasn’t there. Debra looked through all the pockets again, even dumping the contents onto the floor, but she found nothing. 

By now the pain had grown more intense, so it was now about the same level as a headache. All the while she could feel her breathing getting faster, bordering on hyperventilation. 

Okay, she thought, it’s just in my suitcase instead. No worries. Plus I have an aisle seat, so I don’t have to disturb anyone.

Loosening her seatbelt, she got the case down from the overhead compartment, trying to ignore her ever-worsening migraine, opened the latch and rooted through it, searching for the brightly-coloured box she knew would be in there.

Except it wasn’t.

The pain was now an agonising pulse in her head, almost too much for her to cope. The plane gave a sudden jolt, knocking her to the floor, and she was vaguely aware of the pilot’s tinny voice over the speaker system apologising for the turbulence and asking the passengers to fasten their seatbelts.

Debra staggered to her feet, the plane seeming to twist and warp around her as the migraine escalated further into blinding white noise within her head. 

‘Are you okay, miss?’ someone asked her.

The voice was feminine, and the migraine distorted the woman’s words to the point of agony, like feedback from a microphone. With a Herculean effort she looked up to meet the gaze of a concerned-looking stewardess. Debra’s vision fixed on her, desperate for some kind of foothold on normality.

‘I’m sorry?’ Debra replied.

‘I said are you okay, miss?’ the stewardess repeated. 

She offered her hand to Debra, who took it gratefully, when everything – there was no other word for it – everything… glitched. 

And for a few moments her mind was thrown under the harsh light of a reality she had denied for so long, a reality that she kept telling herself was not, could not be real. Debra could not help but stare as the woman’s skin seemed to melt into her skull, her eyes fading to inky blackness as they rolled back inside her head. Debra yanked her hand away as if she had been burnt, and a lump of the woman’s flesh came away in her palm. 

In those brief seconds the cabin became a twisted place from the depths of her darkest imaginings. She turned her head to the floor; she couldn’t bring herself to look at the other passengers. And yet their primal shrieks echoed inside her mind, growing louder as though amplified by her pain. She heard the thing that was once the stewardess take a step towards her. 

Overwhelmed, Debra put her head in her hands and screamed- 

-and the stewardess started backwards.

Debra looked around her again. Just as suddenly she was back in the cabin, surrounded once again by normal people, some of whom were staring at her in concern. The stewardess stepped towards her and offered Debra her hand again, more hesitantly this time.

‘Madam,’ she said gently, ‘I’ll have to ask you to return to your seat. You’re disturbing the other passengers.’

The stewardess put an arm around her shoulder. Debra recoiled from her touch and pushed past her. Pausing only to snatch up her handbag, she bolted for the bathroom and locked the door, almost blinded in agony. As the world’s glitching in-and-out became more frequent, she dumped her bag on the floor and positioned her head over the toilet, telling herself it was because of the nausea, but constantly wary of the mirror hanging nearby.

There was a knocking sound like thunder against the door. Debra reflexively jerked upright… 

…and looked straight into her own reflection. 

She froze. 

Debra stared into the mirror, and she felt that nightmarish figure staring back into her very soul. Some part of her realised that she was faced with the real her, the thing she had been hiding from for so long, the thing that her last shred of sanity kept protesting could not be real. And yet she could not bring herself to look away, taking in every last detail. 

The mirror was small, mercifully only big enough to show her from the neck upwards. Her skin was deathly-pale with a sickly red tinge and covered in a myriad of small black lines not dissimilar to cracks. The muscles in her face seemed stiffer, so that even the slightest change of her expression drew some kind of pain, the flesh seeming to stretch and pull with every movement. 

Pressing a hand to her face, she recoiled at the feeling of icy coldness, almost like porcelain. Debra gasped. With that sudden change in expression the rigid skin was stretched to its limit and fractured in a long diagonal split. Like a crack in a window pane it continued to spread. Fragments of her face, pieces of her head, started falling to the floor and shattering, revealing patches of shrivelled black flesh flecked with inky-blue veins. 

Somehow the worst part of it all was that her basic form remained humanoid, as though her body was little more than a shell to keep the thing inside hidden from others – from herself.

Before she could turn away the centre of her forehead came loose, revealing another patch of black flesh and a glowing third eye underneath the façade. Clinging to her sides with bony arms, she bent over and retched, watching as the substance in the bowl changed from watery vomit to unspeakable black bile. Twenty seconds went by without another glitch, and it became clear that this hellish reality had completely taken over. Or perhaps her illusion had broken down; she couldn’t bring herself to decide. 

Another fragment fell into the bowl and floated to the surface, and she found herself staring back into her own lifeless eye.

A thousand miles away, she heard the creature knocking on the door, asking in the stewardess’ voice for her to come out and return to her seat. Unable to reply, Debra listened as the creature began pounding on the door, threatening to break it down. 

The sound finally startled her into action. In a final desperate effort she turned her bag upside-down, and at last a small box fell out onto the floor. She tore it apart, ripped open the blister packaging within, shoved three of the small tablets in her mouth and swallowed. The bathroom door swung open-

-and Debra turned to see the stewardess step in with a face like thunder. ‘Madam,’ she said, ‘I won’t ask you again, will you please return to your seat!’

Debra pressed her hand to her face, felt the warm unharmed flesh beneath her fingers and let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. 

‘Yes, of course. It’s just that I can sometimes get a little…’ she nearly choked getting the next words out, but managed to force a smile, ‘…a little hysterical on planes. I hope you understand.’

The stewardess smiled in return. ‘Of course miss.’ She replied, offering a friendly hand. 

Fighting back the image of the melting flesh, Debra took it and allowed the stewardess to lead her back to her seat.

It was going to be alright, she thought, sitting down. The pain was gone once again, and all was well. She’d just had a little scare, that was all. She placed a pillow behind her head and closed her eyes. 

Only for them to snap back open moments later. A man was panicking further down the plane, just as she had been moments earlier. She thought about the unrelenting fear she’d fled from for so long, her slipping grasp on reality and fantasy, and most of all the isolation. Now she had the chance to offer that help to someone who needed it just as much as she had, if not more.

Debra folded the pillow over her ears to drown it out. Let somebody else be the lunatic for a change. 

As far as she was concerned, there was nothing to worry about. 

Then there was the sound of struggling, and Debra opened her eyes again to see the young man clutching to one of the stewards, babbling that they had to help him. The steward threw him off, knocking him into Debra’s seat. He whipped around and his eyes widened with horror as their eyes made contact. Looking into the reflection in his pupils, she recognised the same grotesque image she had seen in the mirror.

In the very back of her mind, she thought she could feel her face start to stiffen.


End file.
